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The University of Washington has launched a new project that could dramatically increase the power of academic research by giving a broad universe of scientists — including astronomers, physicists, chemists and biologists — faster and smarter ways of extracting information and meaning from the increasingly large amounts of data they have available to them.

The new project is managed by the UW’s newly established eScience Institute and paid for in part by a $37.8 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The UW is sharing the grant with the University of California–Berkeley and New York University.

The project addresses a common conundrum in the research community: While an enormous amount of data is generated by everything from sensor networks on the ocean floor to measurements of the proteins moving in human cells, there is a shortage of the very data scientists who know how to extract insights from these data.

Click here to read more from this April 2014 Seattle Business article by Sally James.